This is the beauty of open source. Apache 1.3 is still widely used, and many products are still based on it. If the Apache Foundation no longer wants to maintain it, others are free to pick it up and carry on. I wouldn't be surprised if this happened sooner rather than later.
But it's their time to spend as they want. There are people working on a new port of Firefox to Mac OS 9 (Classilla). That's an operating system that hasn't been updated in 10 years. But if people are having fun doing this, that's great. If the product was closed source, there would simply be no option.
Well seeing as how they decided to not support non-native G3/G4 Macs for OS/X, we had $4,000(actual value at the time, not the price we paid retail) of beige Macs suddenly worth $0; when Mozilla/Firefox stopped supporting them as well, we couldn't even give the things away though they ran faster than some of the native G3/G4 machines we had. I tossed the last one of them onto the curb last year after I couldn't find a decent Linux distro or otherwise for it.
Not exactly, one fundamental advantage is that it used Pascal strings mostly, avoiding the problems of C strings. I once read a old Slashdot comment on the security advantages, and it made me even more sad about the failure of the Copland project, which would have been probably much more secure than Mac OS X ended up being.
Good point, Pascal strings are more secure. But on the other hand the lack of protected memory and multiuser security model are less secure. I guess advantage may still be with the pascal strings, but I'm not sure.
The reason specifically mentioned in the article for Mac OS 9 being more secure was the lack of remote (or local) shell access which is what I was thinking of as a major liability for end users, at least for me.
Open Source (Score:4, Interesting)
This is the beauty of open source. Apache 1.3 is still widely used, and many products are still based on it. If the Apache Foundation no longer wants to maintain it, others are free to pick it up and carry on. I wouldn't be surprised if this happened sooner rather than later.
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Yes, the "beauty of open source" is that people waste time and energy on an obsolete product. Reminds me of Microsoft.
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But it's their time to spend as they want. There are people working on a new port of Firefox to Mac OS 9 (Classilla). That's an operating system that hasn't been updated in 10 years. But if people are having fun doing this, that's great. If the product was closed source, there would simply be no option.
Re:Open Source (Score:2)
Wow, I can't believe there are people still using Mac OS 9. It was better than Windows 98, but that's about all it has going for it these days.
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That's true, but its security comes from its limitations. Doesn't really explain why anyone would want to run Firefox on it though.
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HTML5 Porn.
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Good point, Pascal strings are more secure. But on the other hand the lack of protected memory and multiuser security model are less secure. I guess advantage may still be with the pascal strings, but I'm not sure.
The reason specifically mentioned in the article for Mac OS 9 being more secure was the lack of remote (or local) shell access which is what I was thinking of as a major liability for end users, at least for me.
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But on the other hand the lack of protected memory and multiuser security model are less secure.
And Copland would have added support for this while preserving the security advantages that classic Mac OS had, which why it is sad that it filed
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What? OS9 doesn't even have any sort of per-process memory protection. The only way it could possibly be considered secure is through obscurity.